Janet Kraynak

2017 — Book

Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life

Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life seeks to analyze the role of contemporary art in a new digital episteme, whereby digitization is approached not as a set of mechanisms, but the animating force of everyday life itself. Taking a historical perspective, the book traces the rise of postmodernism and neoconservative politics in the 1980s, the advent of cable news and first Internet search engine in the mid-90s, and social media platforms of the early aughts, arguing that what is materializing is the deterioration of a democratic public sphere and the production of new forms of political inequality.

Janet Kraynak teaches in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is the Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies. She is the author of Nauman Reiterated (University of Minnesota Press, Electronic Mediations series, 2014), Monica Bonvicini (Phaidon Press, 2014), and the editor of Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews (MIT Press, 2003). Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Grey Room, Artforum, Frieze, and the Journal of Visual Culture.